Quote from: Surly1 on Nov 16, 2023, 06:44 PM

Quote from: RE on Nov 15, 2023, 06:32 AMSince private developers won't build affordable housing, a Goobermint home building company like the WPA should be assigned the resposibility for building single and double occupancy units in every major city equal to or greater than the number of immigrants that city is expected to accept each year.

While I applaud the image of banksters and developers either reduced to penury and/or swinging from lampposts, don't overlook the NIMBY factor. Every time a municipality down here tries to create "affordable" housing, the local civic leagues mount a hue and cry about how such a project would mean The End of the World as we Know It: not in my back yard. After all, it might house "those" people.

Some things never change. In America. the only unforgivable crime is to be poor.

Indeed, NIMBY is a big problem, which is why the Hooverville in NYC was plopped down on Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.  It's an old airstrip all the way out on Jamaica bay which might be like 2 feet above sea level so as soon as you get a decent storm and a King Tide, all the migrants there will be washed out to sea.  lol.

The Homeless Migrants are so low on the NIMBY scale, not even the people who live in the crime infested project housing in Brooklyn want them next door.  There is no public transportation out there, no subway or bus service for miles.  No stores, no schools, nada.  You might as well be putting them in the middle of the sahara desert.

As you indicate, even for normal low income housing,  "middle class" neighborhoods such as they exist anymore don't want them because their precious property value would decrease, because of course the next buyer doesn't want to live next to poor people.  That's WHY people moved out of the cities to the suburbs, once you got rich enough to afford one of the tract houses built on Long Island after WWII, you left your apartment in Brooklyn for new poor immigrants to move into.

Now of course nobody currently in those apts can afford to move out of them to new  McMansions out in the burbs, both because theey are unaffordable and because there is almost no room left for new subdivisions.  All the farmland that had been on LI before WWII has been completely gobbled up, all the way out to Montauk.

So the only real solution here is to increase the density of the buildings, which means taking the single family homes still in parts of Brooklyn and Queens, razing them and putting up multi story buildings.  Nobody who owns a house in such a neighborhood wants that now, because no matter how much a developer pays for their plot of land, it's not going to be enough to buy anything close to what they would be selling.

NYC itself has had the same 8M or so population size my whole life.  The only increase in population has been in the "Greater NY Area", which is about a 25 mile radius around Manhattan and includes all the "Bridge & Tunnel" people from NJ, LI and Westchester County.The only way to increase the population housing capacity would be to raze the single family homes in places like Nassau County and Hoboken and on Staten Island.  The Boomers who own those homes won't sell them, they'll leave them in their wills for their favorite Gen Z Great Grandchild.

Too many people want to move in to NY from around the world, just like they always have.  The difference today is the people who have been living there no longer have better places to move to as they become richer.  Everywhere else is too expensive to replace what they have, and there aren't great new high paying job opportunities elsewhere to attract most of them, particularly retired Boomers.

Basically, some other city should be picked to send all these folks to after they cross the border.  Maybe some old Rust Belt cities like Cleveland or Buffalo have room to build some new low income housing.  Any job opportunities in those place?  Well, no, that's why they are rust belt cities!  lol.

Since this is only the beginning of the Collapse of Industrial Civilization, things will be getting worse before they get better.  Much worse.  Enjoy this moment.  10 years from now these will be the Good Old Days.


RE